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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi Craig, On Wed, 11 Feb 2015, Craig Boman said: > Dear Code4Lib, > > Has your library ever hosted a hackathon for university students? If so, > would you do it again? Anything you wish you had known before hosting the > hackathon? We held a student hackathon at the Univ of Minnesota last year. The event wasn't sponsored by the Libraries, but rather by a campus developers' group. Getting enough students in attendance to spin up several different projects was challenging - we had a number of staff professionals there to mentor projects and help them get underway, and ultimately I think we had more staff in attendance than students. For logistical reasons (room scheduling), we held it on a Friday and Saturday if I recall. We knew it would be difficult for a lot of students to be able to stay for long periods amidst class schedules, but that was the biggest hindrance in the end. It is difficult to schedule the time needed to do focused work on a project, even when the project is somewhat planned ahead. I think we began it with a handful of ideas to work on, and had enough attendees to get two groups going. One of them was pretty successful, despite bootstrapping the project from nothing. Getting people together to work on an existing project that's able to onboard contributors quickly would work even better. (by the way, I'm a UD alum) - -- ++++++++++++++++++++ Michael Berkowski University of Minnesota Libraries [log in to unmask] 612.626.6137 PGP Public Key: http://z.umn.edu/mjbpubkey ++++++++++++++++++++ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iEYEARECAAYFAlTbfssACgkQ01KJk46VC2ZgWgCgh7QGr8sHwEjNrQHGKsdFqykM 3UAAoJmXJz1ZOw+Vp1H3yPlupH4wFjp3 =CmPl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----